Consumers today are switching from film-based chemical photography to digital photography in increasing numbers. The instantaneous nature of image capture and review, the ease of use, numerous output and sharing options, multimedia capabilities, and on-line and digital media storage capabilities have all contributed to consumer acceptance of this technological advancement. A hard drive, on-line account, or a DVD can store thousands of images, which are readily available for printing, transmitting, conversion to another format, conversion to another media, or used to produce an image product. Since the popularity of digital photography is relatively new, the majority of images retained by a typical consumer usually takes the form of hardcopy media. These legacy images may span decades of time and have a great deal of personal and emotional importance to the collection's owner. In fact, these images often increase in value to their owners over time. Thus even images that were once not deemed good enough for display are now cherished. These images are often stored in boxes, albums, frames, or even their original photofinishing return envelopes.
Getting a large collection of legacy images into a digital form is often a formidable task for a typical consumer. The user is required to sort through hundreds of physical prints and place them in some relevant order, such as chronology or sorting by event. Typically events are contained on the same roll of film or across several rolls of film processed in the same relative time frame. After sorting the prints the user would be required to scan the media to make a digital version of the images. Scanning hardcopy image media such as photographic prints to obtain a digital record is well known. Many solutions currently exist to perform this function and are available at retail from imaging kiosks and digital minilabs and at home with “all-in-one” scanner/printers or with personal computers equipped with media scanners. Some media scanning devices include media transport means, simplifying the task of scanning hardcopy media. Using any of these systems requires that the user spend time or expense converting the images into a digital form only to be left with the problem of providing some sort of organizational structure to the collection of digital files generated.
The prior art teaches sorting scanned hardcopy images by physical characteristics. However, this grouping would be limited to coarse groupings of images and a general chronological sequence, which may be inadequate for very large image collections and may not be as useful as smaller groupings. What is needed is a system to rapidly convert large volumes of hardcopy media images into digital form and to automatically organize them into an improved chronological order and more accurate event groupings. This will provide a way for a consumer to easily and affordably obtain a digital version of a hardcopy image collection that will be a high quality presentation provided with a meaningful context.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,745,186 entitled “Product and Method for Organizing and Searching digital Images” describes methods of organizing digital images by sorting or organizing scanned hardcopy images by physical characteristics including shape, size, cut, texture, border or finish.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,606,411 entitled “Method for Automatically Classifying Images into Events” describes methods for separating a group of images into events on the basis of time or date. Long lapses of time are used as event boundaries. Thus, when grouping images for output products like albums or for organizing a database of images, the images are grouped by similar time stamps.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,636,648 entitled “Albuming Method with Automatic Page Layout” describes methods for laying out album pages on the basis of time or date and content. What is meant by content in this patent is a basic image analysis that identifies similar colorations such as histograms.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,351,321B1 entitled “Data Scanning and Conversion System for Photographic Image Reproduction” describes methods for identifying camera exposed information such as date/time/exposure conditions on digitized print images and employing techniques to edit out, crop, enhance, and replace the camera exposed information.
While some of the forgoing patents provide some help in organizing images, there still is a need to provide further efficient techniques for automatically organizing images into further defined groupings.